The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea estates of India’s Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on the lush hillsides.
But life can be tough.
Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Mount Everest.
He gave up on those plants a dozen years ago and resorted to raising one that seemed to have little value: argeli, an evergreen, yellow-flowering shrub found wild in the Himalayas.
Farmers grew it for fencing or firewood.
Persons:
Sherpa
Organizations:
Pasang Sherpa, Farmers
Locations:
Nepal, India’s Darjeeling, Pasang, Mount Everest, Asia